Film

Comments (0) By J. Hoberman Tuesday, Oct 26 2004

Luis Buñuel was not only one of the world's great filmmakers, he had one of the great careers in movie history: Beginning as an avant-garde enfant terrible, he reinvented himself as an underground auteur, and wound up a celebrated old master. For some, the heart of Buñuel's résumé can be found in the 15-year stint when he re-established himself in the Mexican movie industry, grinding out hilariously subversive melodramas before making a triumphant return to European art cinema in the 1960s.

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The Mexican Cinema of Luis Bu�uel
Through November 19, Instituto Cervantes

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This nearly complete and more or less chronological retro spans the period between Buñuel's first Mexican sensation, the quintessential third-world slum drama Los Olvidados (1950), and his last Mexican feature, the surrealist comedy The Exterminating Angel(1962), which brilliantly exaggerates Buñuel's "bad cinema" aesthetic with a cast drawn from local telenovelas. Another example is the 1951 Susana, which radicalizes a reactionary potboiler by exaggerating its hackneyed femme fatale plot to create a one-joke parody of Civilization and Its Discontents.

Even with tonier material, Buñuel used a similar surrealizing strategy. His deadpan Robinson Crusoe (1954) precipitates an unexpected sexual subtext, while his triumphant Wuthering Heights (1954) is a blatant hacienda melodrama that camps out on poverty row before blasting into the stratosphere—a great movie that successfully travesties a great novel.